Yusupha Kujabi

Yusupha Kujabi is helping rural Gambians use solar technology to process and preserve food in an effort to improve their diets, incomes, and standard of living. In doing so, he is replacing fossil fuel-based technologies with clean sources of energy and reducing damaging pollution.

Yusupha Kujabi designs easy-to-make solar energy devices and trains rural groups to use and reproduce them. To these, he adds solar food processing and preservation techniques that can be used to generate income and achieve self-sufficiency. These new strategies meet urgent needs in West Africa where the rural poor face chronic food shortages aggravated by the absence of cheap food-preservation technologies. To prepare and preserve food, the poor often resort to inefficient and environmentally unsound technologies that burn coal and create health hazards. To avoid dependence on costly imported solutions for this problem, his organization also trains the grassroots populations – women's groups in particular – to manufacture and service the solar equipment.
Yusupha works at length with communities to help them adjust to and accept his technologies and to ensure that they are cost-effective. His designs are flexible and accommodate the needs of diverse communities from rural to peri-urban, from Gambia to Cape Verde and Senegal. His vision is to improve the human and ecological health of the region itself, and to this end he is replicating his work as broadly as possible.

Gambia and many other West African countries do not take advantage of solar energy, potentially a very important source of clean energy in these tropical zones. In fact, solar energy never figures prominently in the national social and economic agenda, in part due to the sheer cost of sophisticated, imported solar devices. Moreover, imported solar equipment is rarely adapted to local environments and is difficult to maintain because parts are unavailable and local technicians are not trained to work on it.
Meanwhile, man-made environmental and food shortage problems – such as the widespread felling of trees for wood-fuel, the lack of knowledge and skills in food processing and preservation techniques, post harvest crop losses, food spoilage and spillage – continue to devastate local economies and ecosystems. The problem of food spoilage is particularly acute in West Africa, where, because of the seasonal cycles of wet and dry weather, food is alternately abundant and scarce. Survival and economic success turn on people's ability to make seasonal harvests stretch to cover the entire year, and this requires effective, inexpensive food preservation techniques. Without such techniques, small producers lose money on crops because they must dump excess food when it threatens to spoil. The population at large, meanwhile, is malnourished during parts of the year.
Available technologies are not only polluting, but either expensive or ineffective. Imported technologies require the expertise of trained engineers for maintenance and therefore cost too much and eventually fall into disrepair. Wood and charcoal dryers, meanwhile, are dirty and comparatively ineffective.

Yusupha is the program manager of the association, Partners for Help to Self-Help. The association was founded in 1997 and deliberately located in Kafuta, in rural Gambia, where its services are most needed. It involves villagers in the construction of solar cookers and food dryers, and trains villagers in preservation, storage, and maintenance of the solar devices.
Yusupha does not provide the technology himself, but rather trains communities in its sustainable use. His solar appliances are made from cheap and locally available raw materials. He teaches communities not only how to construct, maintain, and repair the cookers and dryers, but also how and where to acquire the necessary materials. Yusupha always tries to work with local technicians and include them in his project's initial phases. Involving people with prior technical expertise ensures a measure of success for his program.
Training traditional communities to shift their patterns of production and food storage is a delicate process and requires a lot of time. Yusupha conducts demonstrations at every stage of the process, encourages trainees's suggestions about design and implementation, and helps them locate the most inexpensive production materials available. Above all, he encourages communities to agree to a trial period with the new technologies so that they can make an informed judgment about whether they want to integrate the new practices into their lives.
Yusupha and the Partners for Help to Self-Help undertook intensive nationwide sensitization and training campaigns in 1997 and 1998. Although they started in the Kombo East district where there is significant demand for their products, they have been working throughout Gambia and beyond to spread their work to as many communities as possible. Yusupha hopes to achieve a demonstrable environmental impact, and he understands that in order to do this he must change the practices of many communities, in Gambia and across the region.
In reaching out to new communities, Yusupha has had to be flexible in his product design. For instance, Cape Verdian communities interested in solar water heaters rather than solar food dryers have contacted him. Building on his earlier technologies, he designed water heaters for them that could be locally built and maintained. In February 1998, he designed an efficient parabolic cooker which can be used for large families, schools, and cooperatives. He has also developed a solar bakery for use in peri-urban areas where diets are different and the demand for bread is higher. His next projects include a solar honey extractor for the mushrooming bee-keeping cottage industry; many people cannot afford sophisticated extractor machines, but manual extractors made of iron deteriorate the honey.
Outside of Gambia, Yusupha has conducted solar cooking demonstrations in four regions of Senegal. The demonstration sessions were organized by the Forestry and Energy Departments for a number of women's groups, community workers, and educators. He received very positive feedback, and follow-up training sessions have already been planned. One of the demonstrations was recorded on videotape for use in future training.
Yusupha uses the media to help raise awareness of his work. In 1994, he broadcast a program on solar energy in English, Wolof, and Mandinka on a national radio station. In 1997, he started a radio campaign for environmental education and renewable energy technologies. He has also written articles for local print media, and gained a number of his present contacts from such publicity. The increasing prominence of his work has helped build his trainers's training program. In each of Gambia's five regions, Yusupha is training young people to help communities adopt his solar technologies.
Yusupha has received support from Suncook, a Norwegian development-oriented business whose objective is to promote solar cooking and environmental protection. Suncook has occasionally supplied seed funds for Yusupha's start-up community projects. Through collaboration with citizen sector organizations and other international groups, Partners for Help to Self-Help has conducted training sessions on solar drying, cooking, and food processing for many grassroots organizations, farmers associations, and municipal councils. Participants always contribute financially or in-kind for the equipment, and these fees help subsidize Yusupha's community work. To raise funds for his project, Yusupha also consults ministries and private individuals who are installing solar panels and lighting.

Born in 1964, Yusupha Kujabi explains that he has always been interested in design. "When I was a child, I was often designing and making the items and the toys that I needed." He attended a secondary technical school where he took an interest in new technologies appropriate to rural West Africa.
Before focusing on appropriate technology, Yusupha spent many years as a community worker dealing with a wide range of social and economic issues. For seven years, Yusupha worked as an instructor for the nongovernmental ACTION-AID in local Gambian communities. He organized environmental education programs in schools and through community organizations, and worked directly with communities to help reform their day-to-day energy practices. During this time, Yusupha came to understand intimately the needs of these communities and the practical barriers to change. His commitment to technological reform arose from these perceptions of need, from his understanding of local energy practices.
In 1990, Yusupha sought specific training in rural development skills. In 1991 and 1992, he learned about appropriate renewable technologies such as solar dryers, cookers, water heaters, and food processing and preservation techniques. Yusupha has received wide recognition for his work. In 1998, he won an award from the National Environmental Award Scheme Competition organized by the Gambian National Environmental Agency.